PERFORMERS

off-the-wall things.”

— ------— ByBudScoppa ______

66 V really thought maybe I’d have to die first,” Randy Newman told Rolling Stone upon I learning he d made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of-Fame twenty years after becoming eligible for induction. “I didn’t think it would happen if it didn’t happen, you know, a little earlier. But this is great. I’m really glad it happened when I was still around to see it.” All things being equal, Newman wasn’t exactly a slam-dunk to make the cut. The L A native (he grew up in the Pacific Palisades) was never part of any scene or movement. He didn t hang out with Joni in Laurel Canyon or Neil in Topanga. He didn’t rub elbows with Jackson Browne and the Eagles at the Troubadour bar. On top of that, his best-known songs were cut by other, more high-profile acts — and he’s more comfortable with an orchestra than a guitar. “Really, for the medium, I picked an odd sort o f style,” he admitted. “To do that [first] album with [an] orchestra, as if I was on another planet, as if I’d never heard the Rolling Stones.” Like Rodney Dangerfield, Randy can’t get no respect. He was zero for fifteen in Oscar nominations before winning the Best Song award for “If I Didn’t Have You,” from Monsters Inc., in 2002. It moved me more than I’d thought it would, because the orchestra stood up,” he later told a journalist. “The people I’d always wanted to respect me, it was clear that they did. O r maybe it was just because I hired them.” Randy is not one to blow his own horn. “I have no particular discipline on my own,” he claimed. “I got pushed into everything I did.” That would include writing songs, per­ forming them (“I thought I’d regret it ten or fifteen years from now if I didn’t,” he said), and “Songwriting is a really difficult process - bends you out of shape. I don’t particularly enjoy any part of it, but I keep doing it anyway.’’

That stuff was formative for me,” Newman recalled. “I heard it and I loved it — and that was it. It was all there pretty quick: Carole King knew the chords and used them; that’s why her stuff was so good. I never had a hero - maybe my Uncle Alfred - but she was someone I emulated when I was a kid, trying to write like that. But I couldn’t do it.”

he third person to shepherd Randy toward his des- T tiny was his lifelong friend and eventual producer, Lenny Waronker, a showbiz kid whose father, Si, ran Liberty Records. “Lenny was [two years] older than me, and he was interested,” said Randy. “He suggested I write songs, and he would take me to see Lou Adler when I was 16 or 17. Wfe’d go to New York; we met Leiber and Stoller very early on. He knew people and would talk to ’em. I didn’t know anybody, and I didn t have that kind of drive. Lenny was my ambition. He provided it for years.jflj| The way Newman sees it, Waronker was responsible for his entire career. It was Lenny who got Randy a gig as a writer at M etric Music, Liberty’s publishing arm. “I always wrote slightly off-the-wall things,” he said. “But I did write a couple THIS PAGE, FROM that had hooks that Gene Pitney had hits with in England. TOP: Young Randy And my publisher, Aaron Schroeder, was so happy. But then practicing in 1954; with Lenny Waronker, I stopped; it didn’t interest me, really.” 1966. W hat did interest Newman was creating characters and putting words in their mouths. His epiphany occurred while he was writing what would become “Simon Smith and the

Procul Ha rum ft Strings & Paul McCartney ft Wings

eventually getting into the family business of composing for film (“because o f economics,” he explained). A nd yet, these

reluctantly initiated undertakings have yielded more than Bandy Newman Mick's Birthday! The Wired, The Amazing Dylan! Andy! Zsa Zsa! Wired World their share of sustained bursts of inspiration, collectively Human Tnuaan! Terry! Tennessee! o f Snorts Woody! Ahmet! Princess loo! P comprising an altogether brilliant body of work. The first person to yank young Randy out of his pro­ fessed chronic lethargy was his uncle, legendary film composer Alfred Newman, who initiated the kid into the workings of the orchestra on the 20th Century Fox soundstage. The second was the family housekeeper, who tuned the household radio to L A ’s rhythm & blues and gospel stations, giving Randy a taste of Big Joe Turner, Big Jay McShann, and other lightning rods on the flip side of a soon-to-be-transformed Top Forty, whose Tour Hit Parade of bland fruits were sampled by many a mid-century suburban family - including the Newmans - every Saturday night. That initial immersion led the teenage Randy to fall in love with Ray Charles, Fats Domino, and the witty» gritty records being turned out by the songwriting/ producing team o f Jerry Leiber and M ike Stoller.

narrowed slit of his mouth, vibrating his taut lips; this unconscious technique gives him a toothless, rubbery sound.” As he told me, he found performing “scary, a little, but not as scary as writing.” Between 1968 and 1983, he recorded seven studio albums full of character- driven, satirical songs: his self-titled debut; the consecutive masterworks 12 Songs (1970), Sail Away (1972), and Good Old Boys (1974); the “breakout8 album Little Criminals (1977), contain­ ing his lone hit single, the widely mis­ understood study of intolerance, “Short People”; Born Again (1979), graced by a cover portrait of the artist in Kiss makeup; and 1983’s Trouble in Paradise, which yielded the similarly misconstrued “I Love L A .” Newman in Amsterdam, 1975 For the most part, his songs during the Warner Bros, phase were obliquely confronting mixtures of puns, pathos, and skewed takes on the cliches of the melodramatic pop music of an earlier era. ‘I never thought my stuff was hard Some, like “Yellow Man,” “Political Science,” and “Rednecks,” for people to understand.” make it relatively easy on the listener by imposing a clear point of view - their narrators are bigoted simpletons. Other songs, like the melodically beautiful but lyrically hackneyed “I’ll Be Home,” are more psychologically complex, demand­ Amazing Dancing Bear,” in 1965. Letting his imagination run ing that the listener decide how to take overused phrases wild, he transformed a conventional pop song into a fanciful like “Remember, baby/You can always count on me.” Do you character sketch. “It started as a song for Frank Sinatra Jr.,” laugh at the narrator s self-delusion, or do you let yourself be he explains. “It had a girl’s name - ‘Cathy, Cathy, Cathy, dab affected by his desire to be true, no matter how futile? “Love dabdah’ - and I just couldn’t stand it. So I just thought of Story’ begins as just that, but gradually moves past young ‘bear,’ looking for a rhyme for that, ‘wear,’ ‘stare,’ and contin­ love, through settling down” to family life, and finally to an ued — really continued, till now. So I completely disappeared.” old people’s home, where ‘W e ’ll play checkers all day/Till w e Translation: From that moment onward, his voice became pass away.” W hoa. those of the characters he created. But why did he decide to become an artist? “A t first I was Pewmap s best songs ponder the human comedy in an shocked by how far away the final versions were from what I I even-handed, compassionate way, even when then- had envisioned when I was writing the songs, and it got to the subjects are deeply flawed. While talking to Barney Hoskyns point where I couldn’t stand to hear myself complaining all in 2003 about the twisted love ballad “Marie,” from Good Old the time,” he explained to journalist Terry Staunton in 2008. Boys, Newman said of its narrator, “Yeah, he means what he’s He had offers from Warner Bros, and A6?M based on saying. He does love her. But he can’t say it unless he’s drunk. his song demos for Metric. Early on, he hadn’t even sung It’s more interesting to me when it’s something like that, I his demos himself, ceding that task to RJ. Proby and Jackie gotta admit. There’s just more going on. There is all that extra DeShannon. He hadn t played on a bunch of them, either, stuff you know about the guy.. . Sometimes I’ll take a little because Leon Russell was also around. “So I was like as back­ tiny thing, like the guy who loves ELO on ‘The Story of a ward as you could be,” he says. “I was gonna sign w ith Afe?M Rock and Roll Band’ [from Born Again] but gets it all wrong.” because they offered me $10,000, and Lenny” - by then, an “I never thought my stuff was that hard for people to A6?R man at Warners - “was really pissed off. So I got War­ understand,” Randy told me. “The thing is, it requires you to ners to offer me at least that and I signed with them.” listen, and not come in halfway or be eatin’ a potato chip.” In the thirty ensuing years, he’s made three albums of e wais a less than natural performer, as I noted after newly written songs - Land o f Dreams (1988), Bad Love watching him do a solo show at the Bitter End in 1971: H (1999), and Harps and Angels (2008). Aside from the ambi­ “On stage, Randy hunches over his piano, touches the keys, tious 1995 musical Faust, and solo reworkings of his material and his face suddenly changes. His normally cherubic cheeks in Songboo\ Vol. 1 and Vbl 2, Newman has focused qn film look as if they’re being pulled downward by the force o f 3 G ’s, work, including Ragtime, The TLatural, Parenthood, Avalon, and his eyelids follow suit. He forces his voice through the the Toy Story series, A Bug’s Life, and Monsters Inc. Selected Discography

Randy Newman Born Again Reprise, 1968 Warner Bros., 1979

Live in 1992 12 Songs Trouble in Paradise Reprise, 1970 Warner Bros., 1983

W hen I first met Newman in 1971, he said of songwrit- ing, “It’s a really difficult process - bends you out of shape. I don’t particularly enjoy any part of it, but I keep doing it anyway. I’ve always done it, but I never actually li\ed it. I don’t know what compels me to do it, except when I like what I’ve done, it makes it all worthwhile. But it’s never been recre­ Sail Away ational. The whole thing makes me nervous.” Land of Dreams Reprise, 1972 Reprise, 1988 M ore than four decades later, his attitude hasn’t changed. “The last song I wrote, the election song [‘I’m Dreaming,’ KANDY NEWMAN whose ironic refrain goes, ‘I’m dreaming of a white presi­ dent’], took me a long time, because it was hard to not rlatm doing it. It was really kinda delicate. God knows if I didn’t tromp things here and there. That one was hard. But [song­ writing] never got easier, no.” As self-denigrating as he tends to be about himself and his work, the author of this canon doesn’t dispute its overall Good Old Boys Bad Love Reprise, 1974 quality. “I looked back when I did those Songboo1{ records, DreamWorks, 1999

and they’re good,” he said of his albums. “I stayed good. I Randy Newman mean, even Born Again, as odd as it is, is good. A small sub­ B A N D Y N E W M A N harpa and andéis ject, the stuff I did. But, y’know, the songs on Harps and Angels and Bad Love are as good as anything I’ve ever done. The best of them are as good as the songs on Sail Away, w ay back. I would never have imagined things as odd as the stuff I’ve written would’ve lasted for forty years. It just wasn’t the norm for songs like that to go so far.” Little Criminals Harps and Angels Waronker crystallized it in his essay for the 1996 box Warner Bros., 1977 Nonesuch, 2008 set, Guilty. “Randy Newman has been an enormous influence on a generation of singer-songwriters,” he wrote. “I think it’s because so many of his songs have taken on a life of their own.

I’m convinced that in years to'come, his work will be consid­ Monsters University (“Sequel; very amusing,” he noted), and ered as much a part of Americana as that of Stephen Foster, another project looms on the horizon. “The record company George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Irving Berlin. In my called and said they want an album in 2014 - which, if I’m opinion, there is no better songwriter than Randy Newman.” alive, I’ll give it to ’em.” He paused for a beat, then added, “I But this inductee isn’t resting on his laurels. A s this was don’t know how much longer I can do this.” written, he was facing another deadline, writing the music for But with that, Randy Newman got back to work. ® A BRIEF HISTORY OF ROCK MUSIC IN THE MOVIES

______By Roy Trakin ______

hese days, rock music dominates movie soundtracks, but that wasn’t always the case. Back in 1955, when Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” was used over the title credits for Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle, a film that depictedT a “bleak and disturbing” view of juvenile gang activity in the New York City public school system, it caused an outcry. The combination of the raucous song and the movie’s sub' ject matter sparked controversy. No less than Clare Booth Luce, America’s ambassador to Italy at the time and wife of Life publisher Henry Luce, condemned the movie as “degenerate” and insisted it be pulled as an entry in that year’s Venice Film Festival. All the media attention helped make Haley*s “fox trot” (that’s how it’s referred to on the initial Décca release) the first rock & roll single to climb to Number One on the charts. It wouldn’t be the last time veteran Hollywood producers like Sam Katsman saw the profit potential in combining edgy, youth-oriented subjects with rock music for success at the box office and record sales. The B movie mogul realised that if kids would shell out the bucks to see a film with a single rock song on the soundtrack, they would certainly pay for one that featured the actual performers. The revelation led to fifties rocksploitation flicks like Roc\Around the Cloc\, Don’t Knoc\the Roc\, and Go, Johnny, Go — the latter tw o starring DJ Alan Freed, hosting performances by Frankie Lymon, Eddie Cochran, Ritchie Valens, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard.

British fans line up to see an early rock & roll movie, Rock Around the Clock, featuring Bill Haley and His Comets, the Platters, and others, Manchester, England, 1956. Upping the ante, writer-director Frank Tashlin’s glori­ ously cartoonish Technicolor musical, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), was the first movie to build its plot around a rock 6s? roll theme. The light-hearted satire of the early rock business featured busty Jayne Mansfield as an aspiring pop singer and girlfriend of a gangster (Edmund O ’Brien). W hen the gangster enlists an agent to turn her into a star, the agent discovers she can’t sing. But what she can do is emit a “piercing scream” - the perfect accompaniment to “Rock Around the Rock Pile,” a song the gangster wrote while in prison for income-tax eva­ i i y p i sion. That flimsy plot serves as an excuse for a whole series o f s s s s 1. remarkable musical numbers — by such Rock and Roll Hall of Jayne Famers as Little Richard (the title track), Gene Vincent (“Be- Ma»sfieJ Bop-a-Lula”), Eddie Cochran (“Twenty Flight Rock”), Fats Three films that brought rock Domino (“Blue Monday”), and the Platters (“You’ll Never, into the movies Never Know”). The film turned out to be a major influence on a pair of young Liverpool lads named John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the latter playing “Twenty Flight Rock” the way Cochran did in the movie, earning his future partner’s instant admiration. No account of rock music’s influence on movies would be complete without mentioning Elvis Presley, who, before

« RICHARD -iD D Ii COCHRAN 'G IM VINCIMI descending into post—military service self-parody, showed ■ ■ ■ p c a t t ir s f a t s d o m in o a n d M ORE! his natural charisma in movies like the Civil War melodrama Love Me Tender and Jailhouse Roc\ (whose choreographed title set-piece may be the first-ever music video), both named after songs that soon became chart-topping hits.

he sixties ushered in more authentic movies, combin­ T ing documentary-like realism with rock music in new and innovative ways, including D A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Loo\ Back his cinema vérité account of Bob Dylan’s 1965 U.K. tour, and Richard Lester’s groundbreaking A Hard Day’s Night, which turned the lovable mop-tops into a droll, quick­ witted rock 6s? roll version of the Marx Brothers. Other rock Elvis Presley gyrates in Jailhouse Rock, 1957. Quincy Jones in the studio, 1969; and various soundtracks composed by Jones. docs followed in quick succession, the most notable being Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop, the Maysles’ Gimme Shelter (about the Stones’ ill-fated Altamont concert), Andrew Loog Oldham’s recently rereleased Charlie Is My Darling, and Michael Wadleigh’s box-office hit, Woodstoc\. It wasn’t just rock-oriented movies that boasted impres­ sive soundtracks and hit albums. With the countercultural revolution in full swing, maverick directors like Clive Donner (What’s Flew Pussycat?), Roger Corman (The W ild Angels), Mike Nichols (The Graduate), John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow'Up and Zabris\ie Point), and Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider) increasingly turned to rock & roll to tell their contemporary stories. Simon and Garfunkel’s winsome harmonies helped pinpoint the mel­ ancholy of an indecisive Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and Harry Nilsson’s version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Throughout the 1970s, pop, rock, and disco began to Talkin’ ” set the plaintive mood for the same actor’s turn as play major roles in telling film stories — most notably the use of Ratso Rizzo, the down-on-his-luck hustler pal of Jon Voight’s fifties rock in George Lucas’ American Graffiti, the era- Joe Buck, in the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy. appropriate protest music in Hal Ashby’s Vietnam saga, The seventies boasted a whole new era of movie music, Coming Home, and Francis Ford Coppola’s stunning use of including the blaxploitation flicks of Melvin Van Peebles the Doors’ “The End” in his own war movie, Apocalypse Flow. (Sweet Sweetbac\’s Baaddsssss Song), Gordon Parks (Shaft), Arguably, the standard for movie-music synchronicity can be and son Gordon Parks Jr. (Super Fly), the latter two featuring found in Saturday Flight Fever (1977), whose Bee Gees-laced Isaac Hayes (who received an Oscar for Best Original Song soundtrack sent disco hurtling into the stratosphere. The for Shaft) and Curtis Mayfield (whose hit soundtrack actu­ Grammy Award-winning Album of the Year has gone on to ally out-grossed the film). Soul stars like James Brown, Edwin sell forty million copies worldwide, making it eighth on the list Starr, and Millie Jackson performed the title songs to movies o f all-time bestsellers. Yet another o f this year*s Rock and Roll like Slaughter’s BigRip'Off, Blac\ Caesar, Hell Up in Harlem, Hall o f Fame inductees, Donna Summer, performed “The Last and Cleopatra Jones. Dance” in Than\God It’s Friday (1978), one o f several mostly Quincy Jones, a recipient of this year’s Ahmet Ertegun unsuccessful attempts to duplicate the Saturday Flight Fever Award, helped set the pace for black action movies, with formula. Summer also contributed “On the Radio,” the title jazz-oriented scores for Come Bac\Charleston Blue and Cool theme to Foxes (1980), featuring a young Jodie Foster and a Breeze - a remake of the classic caper melodrama The Asphalt Giorgio Moroder score; Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” Jungle. Jones and songwriting partner Bob Russell had previ­ was included in the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar. ously become the first African-Americans to be nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar for “The Eyes of Love,” composed ith the arrival of M T V in the 1980s, along with the for the 1968 movie Banning. That same year, Q^also received W quick-cutting style of the music video, rock’s absorp­ a nomination for Best Original Score for In Cold Blood. In tion into the cinematic language was complete. Filmmakers all, Jones composed thirty-three major motion picture scores, such as M artin Scorsese, John Hughes, Robert Zemeckis, and starting w ith Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, and includ­ Cameron Crowe made contemporary music a seamless and ing The Slender Thread; Wal\, Don’t Run; In the Heat o f the integral part of their narratives. Some of the highlights include Flight; The Italian Job; Bob Carol & Ted Alice; The Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear to Bob Seger’s “Old Lost Man; Ta\e the Money and Run; Cactus Flower; The Color Time Rock and Roll” in Ris\y Business; John Cusack holding Purple; and the Austin Powers series. up his boom box beneath lone Skye’s window to serenade her with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”; Judd Nelson throwing a triumphant fist in the air while the Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me” rings out in The Breakfast Club; and 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Ann Wilson and Mike Reno joining forces on Footloose’s “Alm ost Paradise.”

teve Jobs’ Pixar Animation Studios released its very Sfirst feature, Toy Story, in 1995, but insisted to distrib' utor Disney that it not be a musical. Instead, director John Lasseter tapped veteran songwriter and another of this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, Randy Newman, to compose the score, which included two versions of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” (one a duet with Lyle Lovett), as well as two other sorigs: “Strange Things” and “I W ill Go Sailing No More,” Newman, who comes from a famed family of film composers that includes his uncles Alfred, Lionel, and Emil (his cousins Thomas and David and nephew Joey are motion picture composers as well), launched a second, very lucrative career doing music for Pixar movies. In addition to Toy Story, Newman has scored six Pixar films, including A Bug’s Life; Toy Story 2 and 3; Monsters, Inc.; and Cars, earning Oscar nominations for all six, and winning a pair of Best Original Song honors for Monsters, Inc. (“If I Didn’t Have You”) and Toy Story 3 (“W e Belong Together”). Newman’s own film w ork dates back to 1970, when his song “Gone Dead Train” was included in Donald Cammell’s 1970 Mick Jagger vehicle, Performance, one of the earliest

THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: Anita rock movies. He composed the scores for the Norman Lear/ Pallenberg and Mick Jagger Robert Downey Sr. satire Cold Turkey in 1971, as w ell as Rag' in Performance, 1970; various soundtracks composed by Randy time in 1981, for which he was nominated for two Academy Newman; Newman (second from Awards. He also penned three songs - as well as cowriting left) receives his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with the screenplay — for Three Amigos (1986) w ith Steve Martin Buzz and Woody from Toy S to ry and Lome Michaels, providing the voice for the singing and Pixar’s John Lasseter, 2010. bush. Other notable Newman scores include The Natural, u r T t m Parenthood, Major League, Avalon, The Paper, Pleasantville, M eet the Parents, Seabiscuit, Leatherheads, and The Princess and the Frog. In all, Randy Newman has been nominated for twenty Oscars, fifteen of them coming before his first win. W ith numerous film directors and composers who grew up during rock’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s emerging over the past two decades, movies have reflected that musical influence even more. Rolling Stone journalist-turned-director Cameron Crowe, in particular, reflects that sensibility, in movies like his elegiac homage, Almost Famous, w ith its classic tour bus sing-along to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” Crowe’s ex-wife, Heart’s Nancy Wilson - a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee this year - composed the score to sev­ eral Crowe movies, including Almost Famous, for which she also wrote and produced its original songs; Vanilla S\y; and Elizabethtown. Starting in the mid-eighties, hip-hop began to infiltrate Public Enemy with film soundtracks, as well, including W ild Style, Beat Street, Spike Lee, and the film Tougher Than Leather, and Spike Lee’s groundbreaking 1989 soundtrack that helped put them on the map. movie, Do the Right Thing. Lee memorably used “Fight the Power,” by Public Enemy, another 2013 Rock and Roll Hall o f Fame inductee, to underscore the film’s theme o f urban racial upheaval. Among other hip-hop artists, Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA has composed scores for movies including Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way ofthe Samurai and a Japanese anime called Afro Samurai that starred Samuel L. Jackson. A s part of Achozen, his group with Shavo Odadjian of System of a Down, RZA contributed music to the motion picture BabylonA.D.

lmost six decades after “Rock Around the Clock” ^matched a new sound to movie images in Blackboard Jungle, rock music is practically de rigueur on film soundtracks today. The best recent example is TJpt Fade Away, The Sopra' nos creator David Chase’s elegy to classic sixties rock, and a loving tribute to the music’s role in forging a youth move­ ment during that seminal era. Set against the backdrop of a reconstructed Wallichs Music City at the comer of Sunset and Vine, Chase’s film posits the question o f whether nuclear power will eventually defeat the promise of rock 62? roll. (Of course, among today’s audiences for T^ot Fade Away, there’s a whole new generation brought up on sounds like electronic dance music who look at rock & roll as previous ones viewed big band swing and jazz.) During a discussion that followed the screening, a young fan asked Chase what he wanted members of his gen­ eration - one that has “witnessed the demise of rock as a dominant cultural force” - to take away from his film. Chase seemed stunned by the question, unable to come up with a suitable answer. W hat was once shocking has become nos­ talgia, but those celluloid images retain their primal power. When Little Richard wails, “The girl can’t help it,” as Jayne Mansfield bounces down the street, causing milk bottles to overflow in her wake, you know, thanks to movie music, rock 6? roll will never die. ® Various Cameron Crowe films that feature music by Nancy Wilson of Heart.